


Le Morte d'Arthur

by WildandWhirling



Category: Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms, La Légende du Roi Arthur - Savio & Skread & Zaho/Chouquet/Attia, アーサー王伝説 | La Légende du Roi Arthur - Takarazuka Revue
Genre: Brief Lancelot and Guinevere, Camlann, Canonical Character Death, Gen, I guess you could read Morgane/Arthur in there if you WANT to, Implied Relationships, It doesn't quite go the way SOMEONE thinks it will, Past Rape/Non-con, Post canon, References to Suicide, Revenge, The title kind of gives it away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 01:19:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16187093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildandWhirling/pseuds/WildandWhirling
Summary: Morgane finally gets her revenge.





	Le Morte d'Arthur

**Author's Note:**

> So, when I started with this one, I deliberately set out to base it mostly after the Takarazuka Revue's production of The Legend of King Arthur. In the end, since it's ME, I think we ended up with 2/5 Takarazuka, 2/5 various and assorted other pieces of Arthuriana I've absorbed, and 1/5 whatever was going on in my brain at the time.

Morgane had no taste for the battlefield. 

Not out of any kind of sentiment, but because it brought back too many memories. She had seen the broken body of her father as it was brought back in a cart, trampled and bloody, the dark eyes that had once looked at her with love and kindness glassy and distant. Her mother had torn at her dress then, then her face, locked in an expression of horror and agony as she knew that her visitor from the night could not have been the only man she would ever have allowed to touch her. That was the last time her mother had shown any expression, her face seemingly frozen into listlessness as if she'd been enchanted herself. The baby was born, then taken away, and then one day her mother leaned over the ramparts of Tintagel a little too much, falling into the crashing sea bellow, and Morgane became an orphan. 

The servants who cooed over her afterwards tried to soothe her, saying that it must have been an accident, but Morgane knew. Her mother had walked those ramparts a hundred times, in rain and snow and summer alike, completely at ease with her role as Lady of the Manor. The stone itself would have never allowed her to fall. 

A letter came to inform her that Uther would come to pay his respects and to discuss her future. Morgane threw it in the fire. Uther had destroyed her father and her mother, and now he meant to destroy her, in some convent where she’d be taught to kneel and bow her head and break herself down until he could force some ancient king on her, but she would never let him. Her life was devoted to one thing now: Revenge. And if she had to go to the heart of Hell itself to do it, she would. There could be no going back, no second chances.                                           

Yes, Morgane knew the battlefield _well,_ enoughto prefer using men’s weaknesses to have them fight for her, for the words she whispered in their ears rather than to take control herself.  

But she would never allow her old memories to distract her from seeing the culmination of her life’s work.

She walked past the bodies of the dead and the dying, a sea of shining armor studded with rubies in the little light that was able to escape through the dark clouds, ravens blinking up from their busy harvest to look up at her with bright, dark eyes. A man tried to grab at her skirt, moaning. Her face twisted in disdain as she tugged it away, the fabric ripping beneath his fingernails. It was of no matter. She continued on her walk, unflinching, her hair a mass of tangled black and purple curls tumbling across her left shoulder.

There, in the center of everything, was what she was interested in, where two men laid on the grass. She came upon the first one first, his armor twisted and black in an imitation of hers, the child she held in her womb and nursed with hatred, the weapon she had honed to her will and her whim. _Mordred_. He was dead, Excalibur thrust through his heart long before. He’d fulfilled his part in their long story.                     

“Sister?” Came the voice, weak, choked with blood, but still alive from the figure in the crushed white and silver armor. How the little fool still held an ounce of hope in his heart was beyond her. Hadn’t he seen that he’d lost? That Camelot laid in ruins around them both?  

Still, she forced a small smile onto her face. It would be all the better to drive the knife in when he realized that this had all been her doing. “I’m here, dearest brother,” she brushed her hand across his forehead in an imitation of the last gesture of affection she had felt from a living human being, when her mother had tucked her into bed that final night. 

Even though gray now streaked his hair from all the years since he had learned to command as well as rule, there was still a trace of the boy she had known all those years ago, his light brown eyes brightening at her approach even as they would soon dim as he fought the blood escaping from his mouth. “I knew... you would come. We are…together…in this…after all." He raised a hand, weakly to touch her, but couldn't, and she didn't pull closer to him. 

And she hated it, the bond, the little tug of fate that she felt at times. She wanted to imagine herself free of any restraints, taking her own fate in her hands with a single oath, however...her little brother was right. In this one thing. But it would be over soon. She would be free of Arthur and Uther both, the childhood she'd never had avenged. 

"I’m so sorry…for Mordred. I know...you raised...him...as wisely as you could.” 

She had raised him for this moment. Then why wasn’t she feeling any sense of gratification? She’d dreamed of this, dancing in Camelot’s ashes, since she was a girl. She had molded every moment with Mordred, every interaction for this one moment, to bring father against son, just as she had brought husband against wife long ago. 

Instead, she could only widen her eyes, mouth parting as her brother drew his last breath, eyes dulling and fading into silence. She didn’t cry. She’d lost that capacity long ago, when Uther had stolen her life. She simply stayed there, among the groans and cries of the wounded and soon to be dead, looking at the still form.     

It was only then that she realized that she had spent so long imagining her revenge, what it would be like to see Arthur’s death, managed and planned from the beginning like the best mummer’s play, that she had never imagined what would happen afterwards. There was a hollowness to it, a void where she knew that she should have felt _something_ , but it escaped her. 

She felt the presence of her two maids before she saw them, purple and pink standing out starkly against the sea of corpses. 

“Congratulations, Mistress!” Hellawes smiled. “You’ve succeeded in your vengeance!” 

“What do you wish for now?” Leia said, wrapping her arm around the other demon’s shoulder. 

Morgane spared one look at Arthur’s body before brushing her fingers against both demons’ cold cheeks, Hellawes leaning into it, keeping her smile and her eyes that gleamed too much while Leia only allowed a single muscle of her face to twitch. 

“Onward, to Avalon.” 

“Mistress?” Leia asked. 

Morgane looked ahead, her hands trailing off their cheeks. “There is more in this story, yet.” 

He had played a clever trick, her brother, getting her to care for him even as she’d cursed his existence. Far more effective than any magic spell. Perhaps it had all began when he’d called her a witch, the first time he’d shown a backbone of his own. Perhaps it had been when she’d held him for the first time, a bloody, wrinkled thing. Perhaps it had come in all the years where her solitude and her hatred for him had made him, perversely, the most important person in her life. But it hardly mattered. She would not allow him to pass into peace without her, nor to rest in state to become an idol. 

No, she only just now realized, she had made a single mistake when she bargained her soul to destroy Arthur, because by doing so she had bound them together: One could not be complete without the other. As she’d had to exist in the shadows during Camelot’s brightest days, so he had to exist as a faint light through the darkest. 

* * *

A boat carrying four passengers, their figures silhouetted against the gray sky, sailed across glassy waters, its approach making no ripples in the water as they approached a rocky, misty shoreline, where the faint image of a dark castle seemed to fade in and out. 

A sword, granted by a goddess, laid at the bottom of a river, small fish swimming past it as the steel glimmered, faintly, not to be diminished by anything as common as silt or time. 

And, in a lonely tower, a gray haired man with a stooped back and shaking hands tended to a woman in a faded blue dress, silver and gold mixing in the long braid that hung down across her shoulder, light coming into her eyes for the first time in decades even as it left the man she had once called her husband. 

And so the age of Camelot passed from the world and both memory and belief of mortal man.   

> "In many parts of Britain it is believed that King Arthur did not die and that he will return to us and win fresh glory and the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; but for myself I do not believe this, and would leave him buried peacefully in his tomb at Glastonbury, where the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Bedivere humbled themselves, and with prayers and fasting honored his memory"
> 
> Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur


End file.
